NewsTrust - Wellness - Most Recent Stories: Opinion

Health Care Reform: Time to Go All In

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

OurFuture.org - By Robert Borosage - Aug. 11 (Opinion) - It is time to go all in to support comprehensive health care reform. The stakes have gotten prohibitive. Republicans have essentially bet the House on it. Obama, for all intents and purposes, has wagered the White House agenda. The insurance and drug companies are pouring in dough. This month will be telling. The debate in congressional districts across the country in August will go far in determining what kind of reform we get -- or whether we get any reform at all.

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10 amazing truths you already suspected

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

San Francisco Chronicle - By Mark Morford - Aug. 07 (Opinion) - 1) Let's start with, say, tanning beds. Turns out they cause cancer like a mofo. I mean, as bad as arsenic. As mustard gas. Smoking. Chimney sweeping. The Jonas Brothers. I mean, obviously. Like you didn't already know. Like you thought it was all healthy fun and games to strip yourself naked and lay on a bed of giant blue light bulbs and have ultraviolet rays blasted into every inch of your skin for hours per week and think, yeah, this can't be all bad, can it?

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"The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite"

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By David Kessler, Amy Goodman, Anjali Kamat - Aug. 03 (Interview) - A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that the direct medical costs of obesity total about $147 billion a year. That amounts to nine percent of all US medical costs. It's also over $50 billion more than the annual spending on cancer. In the midst of this national focus on obesity, today we'll speak to David Kessler, who has spent the last seven years trying to understand how the food industry has changed American eating habits, made certain foods difficult to resist, and helped create the country's number one public health issue. [includes rush transcript - partial]

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Earlier Puberty in European Girls

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Tara Parker-Pope - May. 04 (Opinion) - A 15-year study of young girls in Denmark found that the average age of breast development has fallen by a full year compared to girls studied in the early 1990s. The findings, published this month in the journal Pediatrics, add to a growing body of evidence that the timing of puberty is changing, possibly related to environmental exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals that mimic estrogen in the body.

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Public Transit Users More Likely to Reach Physical Activity Targets

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

obesitypanacea.blogspot.com - By Travis Saunders - Apr. 17 (Interview) - By building activity into your daily routine, you can ensure that you’re getting at least some physical activity on even the busiest days. . . . Although taking public transit may not seem like the most obvious way to increase your physical activity levels, a recent study by Ugo Lachapelle and Larry Frank at the University of British Columbia suggests that this might be the case.

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Inequality is Unhealthy

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By DR. STEPHEN BEZRUCHKA, Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzales - Mar. 30 (Interview) - Americans think that it’s healthcare that produces health, when there really is very little evidence for that. What turns out to be really important is the nature of caring and sharing in society. And the best factor that really impacts that is the degree of inequality. Where societies are more unequal, people don’t look out for one another, they look out for themselves. Where societies are more equal—and economic equality is the thing that is most important in this—people look after each other, society looks after each other, and pretty well everyone does better. There’s almost nothing that is better in a society that tolerates the extreme levels of inequality in the United States. And so, we end up dying younger than people in all the other rich countries, despite spending half the world’s healthcare bill.

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Why there are pathogens such as MRSA in our pork

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Nicholas D. Kristof - Mar. 25 (Opinion) - Five out of 90 samples of retail pork in Louisiana tested positive for MRSA — an antibiotic-resistant staph infection — according to a peer-reviewed study published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology last year. Regardless of whether the bacteria came from the pigs or from humans who handled the meat, the results should sound an alarm bell, for MRSA already kills more than 18,000 Americans annually, more than AIDS does.

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Why Do Conservatives Hate Your Children?

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Joseph Romm - Mar. 22 (Opinion) - CQ Politics reports that the House GOP "offered six principles Wednesday that they say will guide them as they formulate an alternative to the president's ambitious plans": The principles reflect the minority's long-held views. GOP leaders said they will oppose any tax increases, either on income or energy, and will fight a cap-and-trade program to curb carbon dioxide emissions in order to combat global warming. Instead, the Republicans reiterated their "all of the above" energy proposals that stress new domestic oil and gas production and development of alternative energy sources. Here we have in one paragraph the essence of conservatives' long-held energy policy — the Big Energy Lie and the willful effort to destroy the health and well-being of your children and grandchildren and 50 generations after that:

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Put Single-Payer on the Table

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthDig - By Amy Goodman - Mar. 10 (Opinion) - Critical mass is building behind a single-payer system. From Nobel Laureate in Economics Joseph Stiglitz, who told me, “I’ve reluctantly come to the view that it’s the only alternative,” to health-care providers themselves, who witness and endure the system’s failure firsthand. Geri Jenkins of the newly formed, 150,000-nurses-strong United American Nurses-National Nurses Organizing Committee (nnoc.net) said: “It is the only health-care-reform proposal that can work. ... We are currently pushing to have a genuine, honest policy debate, because we’ll win ... the health insurers will collapse under the weight of their own irrelevance.”

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Better Than Sex

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Greater Good - By Christine Carter - Feb. 15 (Review) - Might be that sitting with your legs crossed repeating stuff like “May all beings be free from suffering,” is a little too far-out for you. I’m a scientist for crying out loud, so you can imagine how I might feel meditating while surrounded by prominent neuroscientists, which I recently did on a 7-day silent meditation retreat. Except that I actually didn’t feel silly. Why? Because there is new scientific research that demonstrates the incredible power of loving-kindness meditation: No need to be self-conscious when this stuff might be more effective than Prozac. Also called metta, loving-kindness meditation is the simple practice of directing well-wishes towards other people.

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The Father Factor

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Scientific American - By Paul Raeburn - Jan. 30 (Research) - It is widely recognized that a 40-year-old woman has an increased risk of bearing a child with Down syndrome. What is not known is that a 40-year-old man has the same risk of fathering a child with schizophrenia—and even higher odds of his offspring having autism. The risk of bipolar disorder appears to rise as well. In the past couple of decades, the number of older fathers has increased. Birth rates for men older than 40 have jumped as much as 40 percent since 1980. The mechanisms behind the higher risks are still being investigated, although scientists have several hypotheses that could someday lead to better therapies or possibly even cures for these mental illnesses.

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New administration: Secretary of food

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Post Intelligencer - Dec. 22 (Editorial) - Talking to NPR's Renee Montagne, Pollan summed up why it is so important to get out of the limited mind-set favoring promotion of big agricultural-related corporations: "The food system is responsible for about a third of greenhouse gases. It is responsible for the catastrophic American diet that is leading 50 percent of us to suffer from chronic disease, and that drives up health care costs."

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Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Nature - Dec. 08 (Opinion) - The authors statement is clear "In this article, we propose actions that will help society accept the benefits of enhancement, given appropriate research and evolved regulation. Prescription drugs are regulated as such not for their enhancing properties but primarily for considerations of safety and potential abuse. Still, cognitive enhancement has much to offer individuals and society, and a proper societal response will involve making enhancements available while managing their risks"

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Why the doctor can't see you now

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By S. Smiley Thakur - Nov. 21 (Opinion) - Physicians have been keeping a secret from you: The practice of medicine simply isn't a viable business. This reality affects not only the availability of doctors to care for patients, but also the quality of delivered care. After 10 years in full-time clinical practice, I decided to stop accepting Medicare and all private insurance. Such a move seems illogical to physicians and patients, but was made to preserve patient access to quality care. Physicians who don't come to the same conclusion risk going out of business.

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Dr. Jeffrey McCombs: A Toxic World?

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Dr. Jeff McCombs, DC - Oct. 29 (Opinion) - Some people think that the body is adequately equipped for detoxification, but if it were, we wouldn't have words like carcinogen, teratogens, reproductive toxicants, and endocrine disruptors.

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Research Indicates One in Four Thousand Humans Are Carriers of Mad Cow-Like Disease

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

organicconsumers.org - Oct. 21 (Statement) - research suggests 1 in every 4,000 people might harbour vCJD in their blood, though 95% of them may never actually develop the full blown disease. Variant CJD is a rare and fatal human neurodegenerative condition and is a Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy (TSE) or prion disease - because of the characteristic spongy degeneration of the brain - it is strongly linked to exposure, probably through food, to a TSE of cattle called Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE).

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Consider McCain's health as well as candidate's age

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By Richard E. Seroussi - Oct. 13 (Opinion) - As a physician, I am concerned that presidential candidate John McCain has not been willing to release his medical records for public scrutiny. While I can appreciate that the senator is a "very young" 72-year-old man, he is clearly at an age where his mortality is significantly more likely than for a younger man. The country should understand if he is at significant risk for a disease process that would carry enough morbidity to make him unable to perform the position of president for the next four years.

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Doctors to Candidates: Enact Single-Payer Health Reform

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Common Dreams - By Steffie Woolhandler, M.D. - Oct. 06 (Advocacy) - Over 5,000 U.S. physicians have signed an open letter calling on the candidates for president and Congress "to stand up for the health of the American people and implement a nonprofit, single-payer national health insurance system." Noting that the nation's private-insurance-based model is failing by denying needed medical care to millions, wasting resources and driving up costs, the doctors say that a publicly financed system is "the sole hope for affordable, comprehensive coverage."

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Population, Family Planning and Presidential Priorities

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

rhrealitycheck.org - By Jeffrey Locke - Oct. 02 (Opinion) - Despite decades of success in creating healthier families and a healthier planet, we in the SR/RH and environmental communities are now left to wait and see whether international family planning programs meet the foreign assistance and funding priorities of the next President. As my Togolese brethren would say, "On verra" - we will see.

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Louise McCready: Alexandra Guarnaschelli Talks About Dorito and Heirloom Tomato Sandwiches and the Power of the Pocketbook

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - Sep. 23 (Opinion) - "If you want a Dorito, great. But, if you want an heirloom tomato, you should be able to have that too. If you want a Dorito and heirloom tomato sandwich, you should be able to have that. I think I consider that, as a chef, as a right as basic as health care and I guess that's what I'm going to work for, finding a way to contribute to, not just buying from, local farmers."

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Has American Society Gone Insane?

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Bruce E. Levine - Sep. 11 (Opinion) - In The Sane Society (1955), Fromm wrote, "Yet many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of 'unadjusted' individuals, and not of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself." Is American society a healthy one, and are those having difficulties adjusting to it mentally ill? Or is American society an unhealthy one, and are many Americans with emotional difficulties simply alienated rather than ill?

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The Misshapen Mind: How the Brain's Haphazard Evolution Left Us with Self-Destructive Instincts

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - Aug. 25 (Opinion) - The Misshapen Mind: How the Brain's Haphazard Evolution Left Us with Self-Destructive Instincts

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Weapons Plutonium Fuel Test Fails

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Union of Concerned Scientists - Aug. 04 (Press Release) - Citing the recent failure of an experimental plutonium fuel assembly test at a South Carolina nuclear plant, two watchdog groups today called on the Department of Energy (DOE) to suspend a risky, multibillion dollar program that would use 37 tons of surplus nuclear weapons plutonium for U.S. nuclear reactor fuel.

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Household Products: Start with labels

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Post Intelligencer - Jul. 24 (Editorial) - The public is getting a stinky deal from industry on many fresh-smelling products such as air fresheners, fabric softeners and detergents. The federal government needs to regulate the products more aggressively.

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Family Planning: Striking Plan B

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Post Intelligencer - Jul. 16 (Editorial) - The Bush administration continues its fight to prevent women from accessing birth control. According to The New York Times, a new proposal would require that clinics and hospitals receiving government aid under health programs "certify that they will not refuse to hire nurses and other providers who object to abortion and (emphasis ours) even certain types of birth control." The proposal also takes issue with state laws forcing hospitals to provide rape victims with emergency contraception, a form of birth control also known by its brand name, Plan B.

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